anyone eat a completely whole foods diet.....

[npmommie]

meaning no processed foods, everything from scratch.

if you do can you post a typical days meals.
i am trying to get back to basics, and not use anything processed at all.

[AntePrincess]

npmommie, Completely unprocessed? Not likely, cooking is processing. Even on a raw food diet, you process it plenty. But by most definitions we eat a whole foods diet, so a sample day's menu:

Breakfast - Grain porridge. Pick your own grain. I like whole oats, he liked homemade cream of wheat, brown rice is something we all like. We top ours with coconut milk, almonds, and berries. Homemade applesauce would be awesome, too.

Lunch - Soup from homemade broth, with whole grain bread on the side. Or curried lentils with lots of veggies on rice.

Dinner - Ratatouille on homemade pasta. Polenta. Pan fried tilapia fillet with potato hash.

Mostly we eat ordinary foods, we just don't use things like white flour to make them. We happen to be mostly vegetarian, but meat is an easy addition to a whole foods menu. Maybe avoid storebought sausage. Homemade sausage is pretty simple to make, except for making stuffed links, you can just get the meat pre-ground meat from a good butcher counter.

There are some appliances that make it much easier: rice cookers, slow cookers, and bread machines are all big helps. Fortunately, they also tend to be available used at thrift stores, lots of people buy them expecting to use them, but end up sticking to their old convenient method of cooking using processed foods. It can take so long to prepare things from scratch that a few labor saving devices are a huge help. Eating this way takes a little bit of forethought, throwing something to prep in a cooker in the morning so its ready to be an ingredient by the evening.

[npmommie]

Originally Posted by AntePrincess

npmommie, Completely unprocessed? Not likely, cooking is processing. Even on a raw food diet, you process it plenty. But by most definitions we eat a whole foods diet, so a sample day's menu:

Breakfast - Grain porridge. Pick your own grain. I like whole oats, he liked homemade cream of wheat, brown rice is something we all like. We top ours with coconut milk, almonds, and berries. Homemade applesauce would be awesome, too.

Lunch - Soup from homemade broth, with whole grain bread on the side. Or curried lentils with lots of veggies on rice.

Dinner - Ratatouille on homemade pasta. Polenta. Pan fried tilapia fillet with potato hash.

Mostly we eat ordinary foods, we just don't use things like white flour to make them. We happen to be mostly vegetarian, but meat is an easy addition to a whole foods menu. Maybe avoid storebought sausage. Homemade sausage is pretty simple to make, except for making stuffed links, you can just get the meat pre-ground meat from a good butcher counter.

There are some appliances that make it much easier: rice cookers, slow cookers, and bread machines are all big helps. Fortunately, they also tend to be available used at thrift stores, lots of people buy them expecting to use them, but end up sticking to their old convenient method of cooking using processed foods. It can take so long to prepare things from scratch that a few labor saving devices are a huge help. Eating this way takes a little bit of forethought, throwing something to prep in a cooker in the morning so its ready to be an ingredient by the evening.

we are mostly vegetarian here too. me completely and dh and the kids almost the whole way there.
but i meant processed food such as prepackaged boxed stuff with added 'junk"

we don't eat a ton of processed food, but I do rely too heavily on the meat substitutes, which are really frankenfoods LOL
soy products like boca crumbles, burgers etc.

I want to get away from that and focus more on grains and beans for protein, and instead of buying the kids the big bag of tyson nuggets at bjs, i am going to start making them myself

i have a bread maker and slow cooker, but i would like to get a rice cooker, i always tend to burn the rice!!